


open your houses and let in the night

by magdaliny



Series: quiet americans [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Friendship, M/M, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 07:08:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14051640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: “We did all right, though. Didn't we?”





	open your houses and let in the night

 

### March 2018

 

“So by _out_ and _for dinner_ ,” Eva says, air-quoting with unnecessary sarcasm, “I assume you mean here, with takeaway, dog under the table. Candles, ironic or otherwise.”

Jay regards her over his lap easel. Tabby's taken the kids fishing with her uncles, and between a productive morning and a new teaching fellow to shuffle the bulk of her marking onto, Eva's already finished her work for the weekend. In her boredom she's come over to reorganize his books alphabetically—by title instead of author, at his request, although she'd made a lot of faces about it. Obviously it isn't enough of a distraction, if she's got enough brain left over to make snarky comments about his birthday plans.

“Out for dinner literally means out for dinner,” Jay says. “Steve called the restaurant when he made the reservations and asked if they could accommodate blending a meal. Apparently they do it all the time.”

“Ooo.”

“What?”

“See, if it was me—”

“Don't even.” Jay points at her with his brush. She smiles angelically, fooling no one. “It's not a goddamned engagement party. You got weddings on the brain. He's _not_ proposing and I know because I asked. Neither of us are interested in that song and dance.”

“Romance is dead,” says Eva, and turns back to to the shelves.

An hour passes in silence, or nearly; they have the local classical station playing quietly, and occasionally Eva will hum a few bars of something familiar. Jay goes through two sheets of paper, trying unsuccessfully to replicate a watercolor technique he saw online. He's on his third attempt, getting closer to figuring out what he's doing wrong, when Eva says, “Wait, half a moment, which restaurant was this?”

He tells her.

“Do you even _have_ semi-formal wear?”

“Steve didn't say anything about formal.”

“Oh, sweet summer child.” Eva pulls out her phone. “I am,” she says slowly, “Texting him,” walking towards the door, “And making certain he doesn't show up,” shoving it back into her pocket: “In a _tee-shirt_. Come on, then.”

Jay hunches protectively over the easel, dipping his brush like he hasn't heard her. “Where am I coming? And better yet, why? Dinner's not until tomorrow.”

“We're getting you into something that won't frighten the horses.” When he doesn't immediately follow, she adds darkly, “I'll tell Benj you refused to play dress-up.”

Jay puts his tools down in defeat.

The closet in his bedroom is the size of a large casket, and about as dark. Eva makes a despairing noise when she flings it open, revealing all of the things he never wears, because his two pairs of jeans and all his comfortable clothes fit into the tiny wardrobe where they're much easier to access. Hangers are just too fiddly unless he's wearing his prosthetic.

“Ruddy minimalists,” Eva mutters. “This place is 1880's if it's a year—how are you supposed to fit a bustle in here? Well, hop to, get your kit off.”

“How much?”

“All of it. Unless you're inexplicably feeling shy.” Thoughtfully: “I suppose you can leave your pants on.”

By which she means underwear. “I'm not wearing any,” Jay says, just barely catching the slacks she throws over her shoulder at him. He doesn't think he's ever seen them before; some agent must've bought them with the rest of the clothes he'd found when he arrived.

Muffled, from deep in the closet: “I don't care if you don't. Four kids, me, and you think I've never seen a todger before?”

“I dunno. I've never seen the male species anywhere near your place. For all I know, you conceived the platoon without any help.”

“Well, you see, when a woman and a turkey baster love each other very much...”

Jay laughs so hard he stumbles getting out of his sweatpants, and has to catch himself on the end of the bed. Miss Havisham, on the rug, startles awake and shoots him a dirty look. “Christ, Eva!”

“Steady on.”

“You're fucking with me, right? That's not a thing.”

“I'm taking the piss,” she admits. And then she turns and says, “Well, a little. Home insemination is really just a glorified version of the same, come to think of it. Though I don't think it's any less silly. You'd think by the third time we'd have restrained ourselves, but we were still in hysterics. Kim—Kim always said it was worth the labor pains, all that laughter.”

It always surprises Jay when Eva mentions her late wife. Talking about Kim doesn't seem to get any easier for her. She's wringing a button-down shirt between her fingers—without noticing, he thinks, watching her face. He clears his throat. Eva looks down and then quickly up again, wincing apologetically and patting it flat. Jay shakes his head and offers his hand, shuffling himself further back on the quilt. She drops the shirt and takes the tips of his fingers daintily, like an old-fashioned lady getting into a carriage, and climbs onto the bed.

“Don't you mind?” Eva asks. She has to gesture at him before he realizes she's talking about his nudity. He'd honestly forgotten.

“No, I'm okay,” Jay says. “Are you?”

“I'm fine,” she says, then more decisive, “Actually,” and takes her shirt off, throwing it across the room. “Sod it! It's muggy and that collar itches and if two mates can't loll about in their altogether then what's the point of anything?” Her bra goes sailing off after the shirt, and she falls back on the bed with a laugh that sounds about seventy-five percent of the way to tears. Jay reaches for the Kleenex on the window ledge before he stretches out next to her. Eva shoots him a mutinous look and snatches a tissue, dramatically, before batting the box towards the end of the bed like a cat.

“I always assumed you'd carried the kids,” Jay says, although it's obvious now that she hasn't; she has shiny waterfalls of cellulite on her narrow hips and belly, but no stretch marks, no scars. “Who was the dad? Anonymous?”

Eva shakes her head. “A dear friend of ours. I was all for adoption, you understand, but Kim really wanted children of her own, so there we were. I don't know if I could do it now, but we were all so _young_. Everything's fun and naughty when you're twenty-three. Picture, if you please, Kim and I on the bed—all those little pastel booklets said to make things relaxing, so we'd covered the place in scented candles, spent about fifty quid on roses, utterly ridiculous—and there's Mark in the bathroom, tossing off, narrating the Ashes—oh my god! I thought I was going to die, every time. That'll be the last thing I see when they shut the lights off in my brain and St. Peter's going to have to ask me why I have the giggles.”

She blows her nose indelicately.

“How did you meet?” Jay asks. “You and Kim.”

Eva fiddles with the tissue. There's a long, tenuous moment in which he could say: _you don't have to answer if you don't want to_ , but in the end he doesn't. She knows, he thinks. He has a feeling she's been waiting for him to ask. An excuse to drain the wound.

“It was an interdisciplinary conference,” Eva says at last. “There I am, a wee baby Tab giving a preface to alchemical themes in King Lear, and she's come out from Oxford to present a magisterial talk on existentialism in the works of the desert writers—T.E. Lawrence, C.M. Doughty, you know.” He doesn't, but he waves her on when she pauses. “Well, we hated each other on sight, naturally.”

“Naturally?”

“Oxbridge rivalry,” she explains. “Infamous. Mostly it comes out during the Boat Race, but my peers that year were rabidly anti-Oxonian due to some very complicated tiff about, as I recall, the World Chess championships and someone's pedigree ferret, so I was primed to react badly to anyone in the vicinity who lead with their gun-deck, so to speak. Anyway, _she_ was—as I'd learn later—suffering from back pain after a field hockey injury, and she'd just come from a disastrous panel run by a bunch of soggy Lord Kitchener sorts waffling on about the glamour of the Great War. Add to that my recently deceased brother, my looming inferiority complex, and the fact that I hadn't slept more than two hours a night for about six weeks...”

“Jesus. And I thought me and _Steve_ had a bad start,” Jay says. “So it wasn't love at first sight, I guess.”

“We had a full shrieking catfight about post-colonial readings of _The Tempest_ in the middle of Reichel Hall,” Eva says dryly. “I am not, for the record, proud of it. I was an insular little prat in those days. Completely insufferable. At any rate, fast forward: I'm marching in a gay rights protest in Bedford, when who do I see marching alongside me but Dr. Kimberly Levitt, in front of whom I thoroughly disgraced myself eight months ago, and to whom I probably represent everything wrong with the entire institution of Cambridge, inter alia. Just as I'm thinking maybe I've gotten away with it, she hasn't noticed me, she hasn't recognized me, she turns and shouts right in my face: _'Blackpool!'_ ”

“Oh _no_.”

“And then—” Eva puts her hand over her mouth, and for a second Jay thinks she's started really crying, but then she stifles a noise that's clearly not. “And then she says...”

“What? What'd she say?”

Eva rolls onto her side and says, husky: “ _Fancy a shag?_ ”

Jay hoots laughter and Eva stops muffling hers; it's a while before they manage to stop.

“You're kidding,” Jay says. Eva grins damply at him. “And—you took her up on it?”

“Not then. A month afterward, when I stopped being so embarrassed. Two years later, Art was on his way, and Chaz a year after that, and then...”

“Lily and Benj.”

Eva nods. Nods. Bites her lip. Jay takes her hand and squeezes it awkwardly, backwards, uselessly, but: she presses back. “It was a third trimester amniotic fluid embolism,” she says quietly. “Very rare, very—ah. Well, it's one of those things—a friend of a friend's cousin's wife had it, you know it could happen, but your brain convinces you it couldn't possibly happen to _you_ , and—Jesus _Christ_ ,” with startling, unexpected savagery: “Why is it so _fucking hard_ to talk about it after all this _bloody_ time?”

“In my experience there's no statute of limitations on grief,” Jay says. She nods, grimacing, wiping at her face. “Is it easier to talk about this stuff with Tabby?”

Eva shakes her head. “We rather avoid it. Oh—don't pathologize it, for god's sake, it isn't—”

“Eva. C'mon. I'm about the least likely person to do that kind of thing.”

“Sorry,” she says. A wry twist to her mouth. “I must sound awfully defensive. It's only that everyone expects it, you see. You're supposed to be able to talk about anything with your partner, and if you can't, people think, well, that's not a healthy relationship.”

“Stupid people, maybe,” Jay says, which gets a little laugh. “Not that we're poster kids or anything, but you gotta know there's plenty of shit Steve and I avoid like the plague. And I think we're doing okay.”

Eva clicks her tongue. “It isn't as though she's _unaware_. I think she understands it better than if we did speak about it, in some ways. She said once that she knew coming in she'd be marrying two women.” She sighs. “It isn't fair, really. How thoroughly she's upended my life.”

Jay grins at her. “In good ways, though. Right?”

“Oh, of course,” Eva says. “When I came down here I told myself I was going to live like a nun. No attachments, nothing but Ang—Kim's mum—and the gremlins and the job. I was,” archly, “Never going to love again. Friends, lovers, anything. How does that saying go? No plan survives contact with the enemy?”

“Ain't that the truth.”

“It creeps up on you,” she says, sounding more like herself, the wonderment and bite in her voice. “You intend to live in the dark, but you're going along and going along and one day you realize you're up on the grass and you've been living, all this time. Incredible, really.” She looks at him. “Though I suspect I'm preaching to the choir on that count.”

Jay opens his eyes wide. “What,” he says, “ _Me_?” and Eva finally laughs again, really laughs. The color's back in her cheeks.

“Does this hurt?” she asks unexpectedly, taking her hand back and hovering just over his left shoulder; she glances at him for approval before she touches the scar.

“Not really.” He turns his head to watch her pull her thumb down the long line on the far side of his stump, the place where the saw dug in. “It's numb. I mostly can't feel that.”

“Are you familiar with inspiration porn?” Eva asks. Bewildered, Jay shakes his head. “It's a daft thing that visibly disabled people have to deal with sometimes. Idiots will come up to them in the street and gush: _Oh, you're so inspirational!_ Just for existing. It's not about the person, who _they_ really are—it's somebody stroking their own ego. I'm explaining this,” she continues, tapping gently against a ridge of scar tissue with her finger, “Because when I say that I find you inspirational, I want you to know I don't mean it that way. I mean you, as a human being, regardless of any of,” waving her hand, “ _This_. Finding happiness and facing your fears and being the kind, brave, empathetic, extraordinary person that you are—you make me want to try harder. Every day, in point of fact. Hi. Hello. I think you're amazing. Thank you for being in my life.”

If there was a nice way to be slapped across the face, Jay thinks, this'd be how it felt.

“Hell, Eva—” his eyes hot; “What the fuck am I supposed to say to that, huh?”

She shrugs one shoulder. “Nothing, if you don't want to. I was going to put it in a card but, well, we're here. I just wanted to say it, that's all.”

“Between you and Steve and Tank I'm gonna have a goddamn stroke,” Jay mutters, rolling onto his back and covering his eyes with his hand. “I don't deserve any of you monsters.”

“It occurs to me I've never asked,” Eva says. She shifts closer; he can feel her breath against his ear. “Rocky start, you said. How _did_ you meet Steve? If you can say, of course. Or if you don't mind.”

“Oh, that's easy,” Jay says. “I punched him in the face.”

 

☆

 

Steve had clearly intended to say something when the door opened, but when he claps eyes on Jay, Steve doesn't get any further than opening his mouth. And then he says: “Um.”

“I know,” Jay says, looking down at himself. The slacks and button-down are on the verge of being too big, but at least the sins of the latter are mostly hidden under one of Eva's cardigans; it's enormous and shapeless on her but basically fits him, excepting the sleeve she's tucked up and pinned. The tie's hers, too. “This is the best we could do on short notice. Funny enough, the agents who stocked my closet didn't seem to think I'd be going on too many dinner dates. Sorry.”

“You look,” Steve says, and Jay doesn't expect that sentence to end in “ _Great_ ,” and he's not expecting Steve to turn pink, either. Huh.

Jay props his hand on his hip and grins. “Seriously? You got awful taste, sweetheart.”

“It's like you don't own any mirrors. Who did your hair?”

“Eva. I'd say Tabby helped but she mostly just laughed.”

“Really great,” Steve repeats, sounding dazed.

That's about as much as Jay can take. Since Steve's in no fit state to do it himself, Jay grabs Steve's shoulders and spins him to face the road. “C'mon, Casanova, don't make that poor taxi driver wait. You got a whole dinner to ogle me if that'll make you happy.”

By the time they're seated in the restaurant, Steve's managed to pull himself together enough to complain about the obligatory dim lighting in fancy establishments, and their talk turns to more familiar things: catching up on the last week, mostly, when for one reason or another they've missed all their usual Skype dates. Steve's murals and restoration work at the VA are almost complete; his friend Priya graduated as an agent a few days ago and was deployed immediately, to her delight, on a top-secret milk run to New Mexico; Romanova and Barton bribed the household AI into trolling Stark and sparked a tower-wide prank war. Given the state of things when he left—a bathroom covered in cling film, right down to the toilet paper, and Banner threatening to handcuff Stark to one of his robots—Steve says that he honestly isn't sure what he's going to come home to.

“Tank mentioned you called her the other day,” Jay says, when he stops laughing. “As opposed to your usual old-man-overuses-emojis texts.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve says, not rising to the bait. “So, I don't think I ever told you I was assigned an official PR lady after the Battle of New York? That lasted about a week, but since she works with Pepper we sort of stayed in touch. She's mentoring a new girl who wanted to get her hands dirty instead of going the corporate route. I figured Tank could break her in, maybe wrangle some media time.”

“Wow,” Jay says, “You not playing well with PR, I'm shocked,” and bats away the napkin Steve flicks at him. Before Steve can come up with a cutting rejoinder, the waiter arrives with their food, so Jay wins by default. The glint in Steve's eye says that'll last until about the second they shut the front door.

Jay wasn't really sure what to expect when Steve told him the restaurant would prepare his food—an IV stand disguised as one of those giant decorative pickling jars? What he gets is a pretty piece of glassware that looks like the love child between a coffee mug and a champagne flute, and an equally nice pitcher containing his pureed meal. He's brought a syringe just in case, but he takes it slow and winds up not needing it, which should be unremarkable and feels, instead, like a blessing. A small birthday gift from the universe, for all the ones he's lost.

Steve has other ideas.

“I know you said not to, but I did get you something,” Steve announces over coffee and dessert, almost nervously, like he's confessing to a crime. Jay raises his eyebrows; Steve sets his jaw and doesn't flush at all. Oh boy. _That_ means trouble.

“Spit it out.”

“You have to promise not to yell at me.”

“I promise nothing,” Jay says. “I mean, I'm not going to make an ass of myself in this nice restaurant, Rogers. I'll save it for later. Okay, granted, I _joked_ a lot about a pony, but if you actually got me a horse then I'm gonna—”

“It's not a horse. Um.” Steve tilts his head and tries to look serious, but Jay can see he's a bundle of excitement. In the shadowy light Steve looks very young, and very soft, and something in Jay's belly goes warm and mushy just looking across the table. Jesus, sometimes it's as though he's not made for feelings as bright as this. It's disgraceful. Steve, oblivious, adds: “It's just that I know you'd never ask, not in a million years.”

Jay sighs. “Go on.”

“I couldn't stop thinking about what you said, a while back,” Steve says. “About moving out? I know it's been a load on your mind, not having a place you can lay your head and really call your own. You mentioned a few properties nearby, and I, well. It was pretty obvious they all had a garden, or space for one, and thinking about you thinking about _that_ sort of made up my mind, so I—”

“Steve,” Jay says, fond and more than a little scandalized. He reaches across the table and squeezes Steve's wrist. “Steve? Did you seriously go and buy a goddamn _house_?”

“The bungalow,” Steve says. “I bought the bungalow.”

Jay laughs reflexively. The point of Steve's ulna under his fingertips. He laughs again; it has a helpless edge.

And then he says, “What?”

“I talked to Peggy first,” Steve says reasonably; he sounds very far away. “She thought it was a great idea, so we called up Susan and Maddie and Robert, and they thought so too. It was all done proper, no cut corners or anything, and the money's going into the grandkids' college funds, so—”

“Will you,” Jay says, “I need—will you excuse me, for a minute?” and he stands up before Steve can reply, but the backs of Steve's fingers brush his arm on the way by, reassuring.

It's cold on the street. Eva's sweater is inside, tangled up with Steve's jacket on his side of the booth, but Jay doesn't think he's going to be out here long. He doesn't think he can—oh, hell. He presses his knuckles hard against his mouth; opens his teeth against them when it isn't enough. God. _God_. The street is dark and deserted, but far away he hears a woman laugh, and the hushy rumble of waves: the Atlantic ocean, and west of him the Solent pouring out into the English Channel, and somewhere in the far distance France, Spain, Algeria—how many times did he fly over those places, year after year, missions in Casablanca and Tunis, murders in Malta still unsolved—god! He should know, _know_ after all this time that it isn't about deserving, and that more of the fault lies in the hands of the monster-makers than in his own, and even if that _wasn't_ true, the universe still doesn't work like that.

But sometimes—

 _Christ_.

He remembers wallowing, what seems like a lifetime ago now, in the unfairness of it all: how he'd been so full up of suffering he'd imagined it was overflowing, sticking to the people around him, dragging them into the muck. His own portable plague vector. He'd thought if he could just get away, then maybe he'd spare them, maybe even—he'd hoped—outrun it himself. He's read since then of a superstition about bad fortune, about how some folks believe it won't follow you to a new house. It's an idiotic notion on the face of it, the idea that luck's anything like a contagion or a thing you could battle with salt and wishing, and yet: and yet.

Jay takes his hand away from his mouth and breathes, listening to the distant crash of waves, shivering hard and very nearly ready to go back into the warmth. He's almost—but not yet. Breathing. Hand on his sternum as he counts down from sixty, in his head, on the slowing-down beats of his aching, aching heart.

 

☆

 

Steve looks relieved when Jay comes back inside and clasps his shoulder; whether it's more because of Jay's return or his saying, casually, “Hey, let's get out of here,” Jay isn't sure, and doesn't much care. It's the sudden unclouding of Steve's face that's the impetus, joy sparking under his breastbone. Jay adds, before Steve can reach for his phone: “We can walk. It's not that far.” It'll be about three-quarters of an hour, in actual fact, but Jay's been going a lot further than that with Miss Havisham these days, and he wants to take in the night air, to exist a little longer in the wide world of possibility that's opened up under his feet.

Jay picks up Steve's hand and gives it a ruthless squeeze when they're a block away from the restaurant. “I cannot fucking believe you,” he says.

“You're not mad?”

“Do I sound mad?” Jay asks, genuinely curious. Steve shrugs, and then shakes his head. “Hell, that makes two of us. I don't know what to think. Just—Christ. _Thank_ you.”

“I figured you'd be mad,” Steve says. “What with me going behind your back and all. But I—” With a sudden fierceness Jay doesn't expect; Steve's been so mild lately: “I knew you'd never speak up about a thing like that, and I also knew it was about the one thing you'd ask for if a magic lamp appeared in the kitchen, and it was killing me thinking about you not getting it.”

“That sounds an awful lot like an apology.”

“It was pretty selfish.”

“You buying _me_ a house is _selfish_?”

“Well—” Steve makes a face. “Loads of books, when they talk about my generation, they always make it out like we were self-sufficient, happy with whatever hand we got dealt, like we didn't have any sort of ambition beyond—you know. Surviving. But it's not true at all. I used to fantasize all the time about lucking out somehow, making it big, being able to take care of all the folks I loved. I used to figure the definition of 'well-off' was never needing to rely on anybody for anything.”

“Somehow,” Jay says dryly, “That doesn't surprise me at all.”

Steve nudges him with an elbow. “I'm just saying, this opportunity was kind of a dream come true for me. So. It's selfish. And, hell, it's not like I don't get to reap the benefits. I'm just sorry I didn't do it sooner.”

“I'm glad you didn't,” Jay admits. “If you'd tried to sell me on it before _—before_ before _,_ I mean, although—shit, even last _year_ might've been dicey...” He shakes his head, feeling the corner of his mouth tug sideways. “What I mean is, there was a time I'd've thought you were doing it for him. For Barnes.”

Steve graces him with a very long and considering look before he tugs them closer together and loops his arm, only a little defensively, around Jay's waist. As a way to imply that Jay doesn't have to make eye contact if he doesn't want to, it's subtle. He's impressed. He also realizes half a second before Steve's mouth opens that an uncomfortable question is coming to the boil.

“How're you feeling about that?” Steve asks. “Lately you've been correcting my pronouns when I talk about...you know, and. I just wondered.”

“Take a guess.”

“Better?” When Jay snorts, Steve adds: “I don't mean _all_ better, I just mean—”

“No,” Jay says, “You're not wrong,” and falters when he tries to come up with anything more substantial.

How does he _feel_? How can anyone feel about having been another person, once? About a whole other self existing somewhere—some _when_? One body; different points in time. Jay read a book a while back that had suggested, among other things he hadn't understood well enough to determine whether they were brilliant or bullshit, that events didn't happen as people believed they experienced them, chronologically, one after the other, but that time was happening all at once, everywhere, a cloud instead of a straight line. He'd found it terrifying and then he'd found it comforting—maybe Barnes wasn't dead, maybe nothing was—and then he'd been upset: the idea that Barnes still existed somewhere, eternally trapped in the cages, on the table, falling forever in a moment that had no meaning. That's what it would be, Jay had decided. Time that happened all at once, that didn't have any sort of measurable progression, was ultimately meaningless. Nothing mattered or would ever matter, in a universe like that. You couldn't even make up your own matterings there, not like you could in this one.

It's the liminality that still bothers him the most: the borderlands of identity, of humanity. The fuzzy places between being one person or another, between being a person and...not. The impossibility of ever knowing for certain. He catches himself wondering, all the time, whether there was ever a moment where either of them could have caught that insubstantial thing between their palms, where they could have pressed it like a flower, where they could have said: _no_. It's impossible, surely. To think they could have trapped it in a jar and buried it in the earth. Arrested their metamorphosis. Can any state of consciousness even exist as a _moment_? A distinct object? Or is it a process, a parabola—a long and private drawing-down of the blinds? And if they could have, even if it was possible: should they have, if they could?

Jay wants there to have been consequences, he thinks. It nags at him: the senselessness of it. _That Poor Kid_ , he keeps thinking; he's thought it so often it needs capitals. A proper title. Twenty-something years and a grave so shallow he imagines Barnes can feel it when the wind comes through the cherry trees in Arlington. Or around that rock in the mountains, under that frozen river—or spread thinly between one and the other, a stretched-out restless haunting five thousand miles long. He doesn't know which is worse to contemplate. That Poor Kid. And then there's Jay, turning his back when it's convenient and plumbing memories when he feels like it, pawing over the corpse and checking its pockets for spare change. They'd wrestled, somehow, and he'd won.

He knows it wasn't like that, not really. Wilson'd implied as much, when he'd suggested that Jay had been born from the remnants of Barnes's healing brain, like the muck in a chrysalis reforming into another creature. But one time Jakob told Jay the story of Ya'akov, his namesake, wrestling the angel in the desert and coming out with a different name, a different identity; as a _people_ —and Jay hasn't been able to stop thinking of it as a battle ever since. Jay wonders what Ya'akov's family thought, when he came limping back and said: my name is Yisrael. Whether he'd felt new. Whether he'd felt that he'd left something, back there in the sands, in the place where his hip had been twisted.

_How are you feeling about that?_

Christ.

How _doesn't_ he feel about it?

It had felt for a long time like walking through a graveyard at night, fog and whisperings and branches eeling against his face, the crunch of things underfoot that might have been bones, if he'd been brave enough to look—but Jay doesn't want to tell Steve about that. He doesn't want to tell him about the dreams, either: the garden dreams where he's sinking his hands, both of them, into the dirt, and in the dreams he can feel everything down there, the pebbles and the earthworms and the moisty fossilizing chips of wood; and how there's an instant where he knows what's coming and tries to wake himself up before the loam swallows him to the elbows and the smell of it makes him gag, before his reaching-out hands can be grasped, through the smother, by Barnes's waiting fingers.

The first half-dozen times he'd had the dream, he'd torn away and ran, woken himself up making godawful noises and sweating like he was ill. But the last time he'd had it, some time in autumn, Jay'd grabbed back at Barnes's hands and tried to haul him up out of the earth. In the dream Jay'd been certain he could hear Barnes crying, pleading; could have sworn he was breathing down there and calling for someone in the dark. For Steve. For his mother. For Jay, maybe. It's Jay in the garden, it's Jay he's reaching for, isn't it—so maybe—isn't it possible—

It's just a fucking dream, though, is what he always tells himself.

The heart of his problem is that he keeps trying to make it about fairness. (That Poor Kid.) It's not _fair_ that Barnes spent his last years being tortured, fighting, covered in lice. It's not _fair_ that Barnes died young. It's not _fair_ that he got overwritten. It's ridiculous, because normally fairness isn't even a thing Jay believes in. If the world was fair, there wouldn't be any more babies dying of cancer up at the Alex. But when it comes to Barnes, to the interlocking tangle of their lives, he can't seem to take that extra step back. Can't seem to be _objective_. As much as he's tried to experiment with what he calls himself, with accepting Barnes's childhood as his own; playing with the language he uses to talk about that jigsaw past, turning over the memories in Steve's head and in his own—there's a gap he can't bridge. Fundamentally. The laws of physics prevent it. And in some sense he'll always be caught, he supposes, hanging raw and ragged from that nail.

There'd been a time when he'd thought that he'd come to a place of acceptance, put it behind him, and then as time wore on he'd wanted more, wanted something he could touch, record; wanted—closure, that impossible dream. Something like it, at least. If not a place where he could close the book, then a folded-over corner, a way to mark the page so he'd know he'd been there, walked the perimeter, listened to the sounds coming from under the earth and said: _yes. I hear you_.

At times he's felt that if he could just bring himself to—not to become Barnes, never to become him, but if he could _acknowledge_ their oneness in some tangible way, then he would be—absolved. Absolved of what? He doesn't know. In what way? He doesn't know that either. But he's convinced that if he could talk to Barnes, face-to-face, just for a minute, then all the doors between them would open, all the walls would come crashing down, and one way or another they'd be at peace. With themselves, if nothing else. The other kind of peace, coming to terms with what they've done, the kind of monsters they were made into: that's probably a different story. At the end of the day, that's all he wants, really. For Barnes. For him to be at peace.

And maybe, if the universe is as kind as Jay wishes it could be, then maybe—maybe that, in itself, can be enough.

“I think,” Jay opens his mouth to say, and then leaves it open as he looks around: hell, they're almost back to the bungalow. He glances sheepishly at Steve, who nudges him with an elbow and grins and says, “Hey, you. I was starting to think you weren't coming back.”

“Fuck, sorry.”

“You don't have to say, you know. If it's too close to the bone.”

“It's—it's fine,” Jay says, off-balance. “I mean, it's good. It's—”

“Complicated,” Steve guesses.

“It makes me angry.” He quickly amends: “Probably not in the way you think. I just—I wish we could meet somewhere and, I don't know. Shake hands. Put things to rest.” _Stop haunting each other_ , he doesn't say. “Sometimes I feel like most of the happiness in my life is on account of him, and. I guess I'd like to thank him. But I can't.”

Steve moves his arm from Jay's waist to his shoulders, knocking their temples together; it's awkward, for a few moments, before their strides line up. Jay turns his face towards Steve's, his nose brushing Steve's cheek, like animals butting heads in a field. Hey, he thinks. There you are.

Steve's quiet for a while, and then he says: “Do you remember what you said to me, the first time I came here?” Jay shrugs; he said a lot of things, that night, not all of them coherent. “You said Bucky was,” Steve taps his chest, “In here. And you also said it felt like you were carrying him around inside your head, kind of. Like some bits of him were stuck.”

“That sounds like the kind of cheesy thing I'd've said, yeah,” and “Ow!” as Steve pinches him.

“It's only that memories don't really live in just one person,” Steve says, ignoring him. “Ma used to say that nobody counts as dead until everyone who knew them is gone. So d'you think maybe it'd help to think of him as—” he touches Jay's temple, “—not so much up here,” and Steve taps with two fingers, just over Jay's heart: “As in _here_?”

Jay stops walking. Steve, his arm still slung over Jay's shoulders, follows his momentum in a circle, both of them coming face-to-face under a leaning oak tree with Steve's big palm cupping the back of Jay's skull. There aren't any street lamps along this stretch, and the oak shadows cut the moonlight into pieces; all Jay can see is the glitter of Steve's eyes, the corner of his mouth, a slice of his ear.

It's not as though it hasn't occurred to him: the idea that Barnes's grave isn't that awful lonely hole in Virginia, isn't in the earth at all, but somewhere in _him_ , inside of him, the two of them nestled together in the bones they've both worn. But this, the possibility that he could—could look inwards, instead of outwards, that he could look in a mirror and thank _that_ , thank the parts of him that were Barnes and the parts of him that still are, thank himself for carrying this body through all those years, those decades, for picking it up and dusting it off and soldiering on even when the thing he wanted most from the world was to slip out of it and disappear, keeping it breathing not just for him, but for _both_ of them—

Jay feels his hand come up to cover his heart, like he's trying to protect it from a physical blow. Like his ribs have cracked wide open.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Jay whispers, and Steve's concerned expression cracks into a goofy grin. “No, don't you make that face at me, you asshole, I'm having a fucking moment here.”

“I was only about sixty percent sure you weren't gonna belt me one,” Steve says, and undercuts it entirely by taking Jay's face in both hands and kissing him with open want, shocking Jay back into the real world. He can count on one hand the times Steve's initiated an explicit display of affection outdoors, even at night, even where no one can see them, let alone like this: all Jay can do is hang on, twisting his hand in the front of Steve's coat, his cold zipper, pulling him closer.

“Jesus,” Jay says, when he gets a chance to breathe, and Steve says, “Sorry, sorry, I just—the way you looked when you—” and Jay gets himself a fistful of Steve's hair and murmurs, “Let's go home.”

Steve doesn't argue.

But as they draw within sight of the bungalow, Jay slows. It looks so welcoming through the trees, wrapped up in the night; there's a lamp on in the sitting room and another in the attic, the faintest glow spilling out into the yard, onto the bench, nudging the tips of the rhododendron leaves and dusting the gravel with light. In the distance it seems so small and warm that he imagines he could reach out from here, scoop it up into his palm and feel a pulse, a living thing cupped in his hand.

And it's _his_.

“It was selfish for another reason,” Steve says quietly. “Buying this place, I mean.” Jay looks at him; Steve's looking out into the dark, towards the bungalow, but he turns right away like he can sense Jay's eyes on him. “I was thinking about maybe—coming to stay. For good. If you and Gladys'll have me.”

Jay punches him in the arm.

It's the only thing for it. Steve, infuriatingly, doesn't even stumble. When Jay goes for another, Steve grabs his wrist and directs it past him, around his ribs, and pulls Jay against him, holding onto him hard enough to hurt. Jay tucks his face down into Steve's neck and concentrates on not having a stroke. He tries and fails three times to haul in enough breath to protest.

“But what about New York, fuck, what about your—your job, your friends, your—”

“Nothing's to say I can't visit,” Steve says. Right into Jay's ear: “But I'm goddamn tired of waking up and not seeing you every day. I'd rather leave you six times a year than _see_ you six times a year. There's a lot I can give up and still be happy. You're—you're not one of those things, anymore.”

Jesus Christ, Steve. “You're just trying to give me a heart attack so you can get the house.”

“Screw the house,” Steve says. Jay can feel him grinning. “I'd snuff you for the _dog_.”

 

☆

 

Jay's already formulating plans for revenge, and most of them involve Steve tied to the bed— _how_ , he hasn't quite worked out yet, but he's got motive and a talent for improvisation—but Gertie and Jakob are sitting outside on their new swing with a couple of lanterns, tossing a ball for Tobermory. Jakob sees them first and shouts something rude in German at Steve, and then Gertie waves, and Steve looks at Jay with a torn expression.

“Go on,” Jay says, “Or we'll never hear the end of it. Tell them I'll be over in a minute.”

Steve makes a face he absolutely doesn't mean, and jogs off towards the swing. Jay watches them through the bushes as he walks down his own—his _own_!—lane, listening to the crunch of gravel under his feet; it sounds brand new. He can't look at the bungalow directly. He thinks, alone, that the joy might actually do him in.

He's planning to get a glass of water and sit in the quiet, just for a few minutes, count what are coming to feel like exponentially multiplying blessings, but the attic ladder is down and he can hear the Nurse moving around, so she isn't working at the miniature desk she managed to cram under the eave opposite her bed, the one that's just about big enough for a notebook and the sulky old typewriter she'd rescued from the charity shop not long after moving in. Jay's only climbed the ladder a handful of times, for the same reason the Nurse rarely enters his bedroom; respecting each other's unspoken need for at least one boundary, for a privacy that isn't total isolation. But this: she'll want to hear this, he thinks, and he wants so badly to share it with someone, to drain the balloon of joy just a little so that he can breathe. Her back is turned when he gets to the top.

Beside her, on the bed, is an open suitcase.

A cold wash of idiot terror rolls through him. The child in the back of his head shrieks: _No! You can't! You can't, you're not allowed to leave me!_ Which is ridiculous. People can leave, for god's sake, they're allowed to leave, they can do whatever they _want_ , fuck, he doesn't _own_ anyone—

Without turning around, she says, “I am coming back.”

Relief has sharp edges. Jay clears his throat ineffectually. “Avoiding the wedding?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I will attend the wedding. Evangeline has said that my presence would mean a great deal to her.”

Jay climbs up into the loft and, when she gestures, sits on the edge of her bed. She finishes folding a cardigan and tucking it into place before she pushes the suitcase as far back as she can, and only succeeds in making about a foot of room. She sits anyway, her spine straight and her hands one over the other in her lap. They look much younger than her face, as smooth as Lily's, except for the little scar on top of her thumb that always surprises him. It shouldn't; he saw it happen, the first week she came, when she caught it on the sharp burred edge on the kitchen sink he'd kept meaning to file down. She'd worn a waterproof band-aid for a week and a half. With him, it might've been two days. He seems to need reminding, sometimes, that they aren't toy soldiers from the self-same mold. That their component parts differ, even though their maker was the same.

He glances at her face and sees that she's caught him looking. His skin tightens with something that isn't exactly shame, and sees her catch that too. She reaches over, very deliberately, and puts her hand on top of the fist he hadn't realized he was making on his thigh.

“I believe I have found where my mother was buried,” she says.

“Oh,” Jay says stupidly.

She looks away from him, but doesn't move her hand. “I did not know her. She died of a fever in my first year. At least, that is what he told me, and I can think of no reason for him to lie. I know he did not kill her.”

“How?” When she turns her even gaze on him: “It's just—you know. What he was like.”

“He was not a killer. Not in the sense that you mean. I had the impression that he loved her very deeply.”

“Loved us too,” Jay mutters at his lap. “Didn't seem to matter all that much.”

“I have always considered it folly—and somewhat telling—that there is, in a general sense, only one word for love in the English lexicon,” she says. “Other languages have a great deal more nuance. In an ideal world there would be a dozen words for all its manifestations, and each of them would cast a shadow on a darker form. It was certainly love that he felt for us. What he did to us was not.”

Jay opens his fist under her hand and turns it palm-up. A weapon becoming an invitation, or maybe a request. Her fingers slip into the gaps, her small scarred thumb pinning his garden-callused one against his proximal bone.

“Did he ever tell you what she was like? Your mom?” Jay asks. He thinks suddenly, as he hasn't for a good long while, about the shadowy forms of Barnes's parents, his sisters. _His_ sisters. Jay's never certain if the sketchy, half-formed flashes he has are accurate, or imagination, or even other people he's conflated into their roles. They never have faces, in his memory. They could be anybody. He can remember wrists, the bend of a knee; twisting brown hair with all ten of his fingers and sliding in a bobby pin to catch the curl. He hasn't asked Steve about any of those things. He doesn't feel ready.

The Nurse shakes her head. “Nothing of use. No; I should say nothing practical. I know she was blonde. I know that she sang, and painted, and spoke several languages, as did all well-bred girls of her generation. I know that her name was Klara, and that she wished to name me Esther. I do not know whether she would have been a good mother, or whether she would have aged gracefully, or whether she would have stopped him. I can only tell myself stories.”

“Better than nothing, I guess,” Jay says. “Are you—are you scared?”

“Say what you mean.”

“Seeing her grave. It's...” He trails off and shrugs. He doesn't have the words for what he wants to ask. What he couldn't say to Steve, either. The hands-in-the-dirt feeling. Terror and wonder.

“It is absurd to believe that it will change anything,” she says. “It is only the place where her bones were interred. She is not there.” A flash of Barnes's—of Bucky's empty plot in Jay's mind, the loneliness of that filled-in earth. He swallows around the lump rising hard in his throat and thinks: no—not that, not there. Not alone. He's here. He's _here_. “But,” the Nurse adds, “I wish to see it regardless. I am capable of being irrational, you know.”

“Coulda fooled me,” he says, and bites his lip when the corner of her mouth twitches. “I hope the trip's everything you want it to be,” he adds, so he doesn't say _I'm sorry, I'm sorry for what happened to you, to both of us, I'm sorry he was a part of our lives and we've got nothing to show for it but graves_.

She looks at him like she hears it anyway, but she doesn't bring him to task for it. She says instead, “I was hesitant to leave you at such a time. You have been agitated.”

“Think I'll be okay,” Jay says. “That's what I came up here to tell you. Steve—Steve bought this place. For me. For all of us.” He can't help grinning, wider and wider, until it feels like his face is going to split open. “He's coming to stay.”

“James.” She sounds as close as she ever has to actual emotion: almost relieved. Had she been worried too, he wonders? She squeezes his hand. “Oh. That is lovely.”

“He wanted to make sure you'd be okay with it.”

“Of course. Captain Rogers is a good man. I enjoy his presence here, because he is very kind, and because he makes you happy. I am glad.”

Jay ducks his head. “He likes you too, y'know. He said so. Well—once he stopped thinking you were going to vivisect him if he looked at me funny, anyway.”

“He is intimidated by competent women,” she says, and Jay cracks up; she watches him laugh with the corners of her eyes crinkled in mischief. “He was not wrong. I did consider it.”

“Glad he passed muster,” Jay says, once he's pulled himself together. “What changed your mind?”

She opens her mouth and then, to his surprise, closes it and shakes her head. Jay feels the bite of some irrational, unnameable pang; she's never kept anything from him before. As if she can sense it, she looks at him and says: “It is difficult to explain.” There's no feeling in her toneless voice, but there's plenty in her eyes. Jay has a swooping, stupid urge to hug her. She saves him from having to actually make that impossible decision when she adds, more neutrally than usual, “I have been writing about him. I have not yet asked him whether he would consider this offensive.”

“What,” Jay says, blinking: “Like—a book?”

He almost expects her to sidestep the question, but she says, “Yes.”

Jay can't think of a single thing to say. Luckily for him, he doesn't have to. She stands and takes two steps to her little desk, her gray ceramic mug of fountain pens, her neat reams of paper he hasn't given a second thought, until now. She brings over a stack that he would've assumed was blank. It's only when she places it in his lap that he can see the title:

_`EXTRAORDINARY MACHINES: THE INTERNATIONAL RACE FOR THE ÜBERMENSCH` _

`MARGRIT ZOLA  
`

“I very much doubt that I will pursue publishing,” she says.

 _Hell_ , Jay thinks numbly. This is—them. All of them, not just Steve. The Nurse and Jay and the numbered men; more, probably, than he ever encountered. More than he can— In here there'll be things he remembers through a haze, or doesn't want to remember, or even, if he's honest, things he doesn't remember at all, things she'd have seen in the damp corners of labs, in stone rooms, in crematory bathrooms with the taps running loud.

“Why?” Jay asks, not at all sure what answer he's aiming towards. _Why? Why write about us? Why write about them? Why write at all, if—_

“I am attempting to resolve a series of questions,” she says, sitting back down on the bed beside him, gazing intently at his face. “I wish to understand better the circumstances, political and personal, that lead to our creation. I wish to understand the differences between us, and in what ways we are similar.” Firmer, nearly as fluid as usual: “I wish to understand. And...”

Jay waits for what feels like hours, but she doesn't finish. “And?”

“I suppose,” she says inelegantly, “That I am trying to return a favor.”

 _Jesus_. “To who?”

She makes the noise he suspects no one else can identify but him: the delicate little throat-clearing thump of her laugh. She looks out the porthole window at nothing. Or maybe at them, their reflections, fuzzy-golden in the lamplight and the bubbled old glass.

And she says, “I am really not sure.”

 

☆

 

“I don't know why I'm so nervous,” Eva says, as Jay tries to tighten the laces on the back of her dress and only succeeds in tangling them. The light in his bedroom could stand to be better; he can't see what he's doing at all. “You'd think by the second wedding I'd have this stage fright bollocks sorted.”

Jay pats her shoulder in what he hopes is an encouraging way.

Steve, from where he's been exiled to the sitting room with Jay's phone, shouts: “Tabby wants to know if Benj is allowed to wear his Elsa crown!”

“He can wear the full Monty if he wants to!” Eva shouts back, almost beaning Jay with a face-full of foam rollers. “Just as long as he's _clothed_!” At a normal volume, she adds, “Do you think everything's all right over there? Perhaps I should—”

“Gert is having everything in hand,” Jakob says, making Jay jump. The old guy had stretched out on the bed twenty minutes ago and Jay was sure he'd fallen asleep. Jakob creaks one eye open and aims a baleful expression at Eva. “Your job now is to stand very still.”

“Not very good at that,” Eva mutters. Jay hides a grin behind her back as the Nurse comes in with a pack of bobby pins and a paddle brush. She's swept her own hair away from her face in loose french braids and a rolled-up chignon instead of her usual severe bun, paring away some of her agelessness and making her look gentler around the face. Jay, distracted, manages to tangle Eva's laces around one of his prosthetic fingers hard enough to make it lock up. With a long-suffering groan, Jakob limps over to rescue him.

“ _Gott_ forbid you will ever need to do this again,” Jakob says, once he's freed Jay's hand from its polyester prison, “But look: like so,” and proceeds to lace Eva up in half the time Jay'd taken just to figure out which string to pull. As Jay steps back and lets Jakob work, he watches those strong, weathered hands that have only a hint of tremble in the wrists, and can't help thinking that in a kinder world it would be Bucky standing there, helping to fix some niece or granddaughter's dress with sure fingers. When Eva distracts Jakob with a question, Jay looks down at his prosthetic and then at his right palm, and wonders what it'll look like at sixty, at a hundred; how many years he'll have to grow into this skin. He hopes Jakob's wrong, hopes he _will_ need to do this again, on Lily's or Art's or whoever's big day, whatever that is for them: he wants to be the reliable old man in the wings, safety pins in his pockets and at least one steady hand.

“How's it going?” Steve says, close by, and Jay looks up to see him standing in the doorway with his suit jacket rumpled and his hand over his eyes. He's dyed his hair dark again for the wedding, and shaved off his beard, and Gertie's done some kind of makeup magic to make his nose look longer, his jaw rounder, his eyes deeper-set. Jay drags him into the room without answering, not wanting to let him look just yet. No one else has noticed them; Jakob is helping the Nurse brush out Eva's curls and pile them on top of her head. Jay puts his hand over Steve's to make sure he doesn't peek, and kisses him off-center, teeth tugging at Steve's lip on the release. He hears Steve's breathing speed up. Last night it'd been Jay's prosthetic over Steve's mouth, not his eyes, his other hand moving slow, slower, slick to the wrist because Steve's game to try anything, really, especially if it's on a dare, and Jay'd only drawn things out a _little_ in retaliation for the rest of the evening. Steve had called it torture, later, but he'd still been flushed and grinning and sprawled out like a cat in a sunbeam when he'd said it, so Jay's disinclined to believe him.

“We're managing,” Jay murmurs against Steve's jaw, and Steve shivers and says, “Uh, that's—that's good,” and Jay only makes him squirm a little longer before he pulls both of their hands down. Steve looks like he wants the earth to devour him when he sees how many people there are in the room behind them, but he also looks like he's seen the face of god when he claps his eyes on Jay in his dove-gray suit, so Jay supposes that evens out. He has to physically move Steve's face to make him appreciate the star of the show, who probably—Jay turns to confirm his suspicions—who _does_ look radiant, sitting on the edge of the armchair with all the froth of her dress around her, the Nurse pulling down a few strands of dark hair to frame her face.

“Look at you, gorgeous,” Jay says.

“I feel like a porcelain doll,” Eva says gruffly, as the Nurse tilts her face up to check her work, but he can tell she's secretly enjoying being the center of attention. He steals his phone back from Steve and takes a picture for Tank while Eva isn't looking. _Queen Evangeline + Slave Labor_ , he captions it.

 _hell who needs $$$ i'd feed her grapes 4 free_ , Tank texts back immediately. Steve, reading over Jay's shoulder, needs a minute to recover.

They get to the venue on time, but just barely.

Jay isn't expecting nearly as many guests as there are, seated at tables someone's arranged beautifully in the hall. He guesses the majority must be Tabby's family and friends—Tabby'd offhandedly mentioned that most of them are secular, and it's hard to tell—but he spots a handful of tweed jackets that must belong to Eva's colleagues, and he recognizes Kim's elderly mother; it looks as though she's brought her whole bridge club. He feels a thrill of fear run through him: what if someone here is a newshound—what if he's recognized? As if Steve can read his mind, he nudges Jay's shoulder and takes his hand, and both of them walk into the hall white-knuckled, trying to be brave in different ways. Noor Alawadi spots them and waves with both arms, and Jay mentally gives that thread a hard tug, imagining his anxiety unraveling behind him.

As the three youngest kids jostle with their baskets of flowers, as Art grips the ring boxes and tries his damnedest to look grown up in his too-crisp suit, as dozens of eyes watch Eva and Tabby emerge from either side of the hall to meet in the middle, where Jay and Tabby's friend Mina wait in matching suits under the lights—Jay watches Tabby wipe tears off Eva's face with her thumbs and thinks how beautiful it all is, and at the same time, how glad he feels that it's not him, holding Steve's hands on a stage and pledging to do until death. It's not that he wouldn't mean it, the vows Eva and Tabby exchange, their signatures on the license—Witness: _James Smith_ , Jay signs for the second time today; Steve'd produced the papers for the house over breakfast—but he doesn't think it's ever going to be for him, these grand gestures, the roar of applause, the scattering of rice on a parquet floor.

And besides, he's living proof that death isn't necessarily the end.

As the flowers are cleared from the tables and the caterers start setting up hot plates along the far wall, Eva and Tabby climb back onto the little stage, hand-in-hand, to stand in front of the mic. From the table up front, where he's been sat with Steve and Mina and Mina's husband, Jay can see the sheen of sweat on their noses and the powder caught in their laugh lines; they've been smiling too much for it to stay put.

Eva taps the microphone with her nail and says, “I bet most of you are hoping this thing oughtn't to work, if there's any justice in the universe,” to general hilarity. “I won't take more than a minute, truly.”

Tabby leans in and says, “She does this for a living, friends. Be patient with her.”

Eva flicks the corner of Tabby's glittery hijab and grins.

“I begin this story,” Eva says, “In the vaunted tradition of generations of English professors before me: by having an affair with my _au pair_.” Wolf whistles from what Jay suspects is Gertie's table. “When I met Tabby, I was in a bad way. As most of you know, my first partner, Kim, ah—passed away very suddenly.” There's a brief wobble in her smile; Jay can see her visibly pull herself together. “I hadn't the faintest idea what I was going to do. We hadn't had time to discuss the schools we were going to choose for our children, whether we were going to get a dog—even how, god help us, she wanted to be buried. I could only remain on compassionate leave for so long, and more to the point, I was flummoxed by all of the things Kim had so quietly taken care of whilst I was attempting to sell callow eighteen-year-olds on the virtues of Melville. I scarcely knew what to do with a nappy, let alone fussy premature twins. And then Tabibah Alawadi answered my advert for a live-in nanny.”

Eva looks at Tabby, who claps her hands to her cheeks and mouths: _Me?_ Laughter fills the corners of the room.

“I'm ashamed to say,” Eva continues, “That I expected a woman in a burka, perhaps with a dubious command of the English language, and prepared myself to politely turn her down. Tabby made mincemeat of my rather sheltered preconceptions from the moment she walked into my life, and continues to do so every day. You could say that my job is making words do what I want, but today I'm honored beyond the power of language to call Tabibah—my wife.” Over frantic applause, Eva says: “Thank you.”

Jay isn't sure what kind of magic they use to determine when everyone's finished falling upon the buffet, but it seems as though the whole room puts their silverware down only moments before the lights dim and Big Band music suddenly pours out of the hall's speakers. Steve shoots Jay a panicked look, but Jay stands up and grins and shouts, over the din of squeaking chairs: “Come on, Steve, we haven't since DC!”

“Yeah, because there's so much room in that postage stamp you call a house,” Steve shoots back, letting himself be pulled to his feet, glaring like he suspects Jay of having a hand in the music selection. It takes two full songs before Steve loosens his shoulders and starts to smile, and then Noor sweeps between them and steals Steve right out of Jay's arms, laughing. Jay finds himself dancing carefully with one of Ang's friends, and with Mina's burly husband, whose name he still hasn't caught, and then Tabby swings into his orbit and pretends to swoon when he kisses her cheek. “Congrats, sweetheart,” he says. She beams.

After Tabby there's what seems like an endless succession of Alawadi cousins, and then—

“Who taught you how to dance?” the Nurse asks, adjusting his hand on her back when he drops it, startled by her appearance, by how small she feels, this close. She places her hand on his arm as high up as she can reach, her fingers resting gently against the seam of his prosthetic.

“Steve,” Jay says. Pointlessly; he suspects she's only asking to be polite. “Is that a compliment, or...”

She just raises an eyebrow.

“I am glad to see you here,” she says, after a moment. “It is where I wished you to be, a very long time ago.”

He falters. “What—at a wedding?”

“Free,” she says.

 _We do not belong to ourselves_ , someone murmurs. A body; a box. He sees, unwanted, a bathroom washed in ugly light, the smell of copper, hands on his face; her flatline voice, saying—saying:

“There is a theory,” she says, as he shakes his head and tries to breathe, turning circles in a dark room, people all around them, regular people—like _him_ , he thinks, clinging to it; “There is a theory of philosophy which may be applied, in a very simplified form, to the usefulness of a tool. One may say that any object is what it is, and this will be true. An object designed for a function will, unless broken or modified, always be capable of fulfilling that function. But one may also say that any object's function may be modified based on how we interact with it, and this will be equally true. One may use a brick as a paperweight, or as a bludgeon. It all depends on perspective. How the user sees the world.”

He breathes in: quick. He breathes out—slow. “Your point?”

“They looked at us and saw tools.” The perfect evenness of her tone draws him back, slowly, into the world. Their feet still moving. She's taken the lead. “One could argue that this was an act of creativity, to see a usage not intended by design. Crafting weapons out of flesh; making children into monsters. But this was their great flaw. They could not see that an inanimate object is the more ideal form, because it cannot feel, nor can it act. It cannot choose to rise above the purpose it was created to fulfill.” She pulls his head down, her thumb gripping his chin firmly. “I do not believe that we will ever be finished rising above what they intended for us. We will never fully leave it behind. I would perhaps even be so bold as to say that it is our responsibility not to. It is the only way that justice can be served.”

“I don't think justice is ever a thing we can have,” Jay says, as she lets him go. He straightens his spine. “Or offer,” he adds quietly.

“Justice is not a singular event,” she says. “It is a process. An interaction. It will never be satisfied.”

“A virtuous life.” She tilts her head; Jay shakes his. “It's just—something Steve said, once. That atonement isn't always possible, or even good, and maybe sometimes the right thing to do is trying to improve the world instead.”

The look on her face that's a smile, nearly.

It's overwhelming to consider, all the same. For all he's trod this ground, over and over, considered it from every angle, it's so much for one lifetime: all those tally marks, all the weight of grief on their shoulders. “Do you think it's enough to be normal?” he asks, feeling the sharpness of desperation claw at him for an instant, before he stamps it down. “To just—” The children, he thinks, the garden; the kindnesses of everyday life. Is it enough? Is it worthwhile? Is it—

“Yes,” she says. “Yes.”

“We did all right, though. Didn't we?” He dares to suggest a twirl. She allows it. The subdued light rests kindly on her face as she completes the turn. Someone steps behind him, their shadow huge and flickering; all he can see is the wet of her eyes. And then, the light. “I mean, considering.”

“I believe it is fair to say that very little was in our favor.”

“If you could go back—if you could change anything—”

“It is an impossible thought.”

“But if it wasn't,” Jay presses. “Would you do anything differently?”

Her eyes are like searchlights. Christ, do his own eyes look that old? Will they ever? Is there ever going to be a day where he feels aged, instead of just ancient? She looks at him for a long time as they move across the floor, brushing other arms, someone's long skirt breaking against their legs like a wave, and away. No, he thinks suddenly: her eyes haven't changed. They look exactly the same as they did the day she bent over his cracked-open bones and slipped her hand into his belly. She's younger than him, technically, although she's been awake much longer. She's seen much more evil than him. But surely—surely also, he thinks hopefully, desperately: more good?

At last she says, “You know the answer to that question.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs.

They turn, and turn again, and Jay realizes she's gently steered them towards the doors. Irrationally he wants to grab hold of her, not let her slip into the night, but he gives her back her hands once the song ends. She doesn't let go of _him_ , though; she tugs him closer, further away from the dancing couples, the door at her back. A strand of silver hair's come loose from her chignon and tangled in her earring. He sweeps it behind her ear with his thumb.

“There is something,” she says. “I am of course complicit in a great many of the hurts you accumulated over the years, but I find that I am able, with some effort, to place the ultimate blame on forces beyond our control.”

“You know I don't—”

She holds up one hand. “There was, I am aware, no effective action I could have taken, but when I review my decisions there is only one event that I cannot fully rationalize. I wish I had not left you alone with them at the last. Or at the least, I wish there had been more time.”

It's not an apology. He doesn't want it to be one. “For what?” he asks.

“If there had been a chance,” she says, “I would have told you: there are two options. You must either die, quickly and quietly, so they do not know how much they have hurt you. Or you must live so long, and so well, that they are ashamed to have hurt you at all.”

Jay breathes in. Casts his stinging eyes up at the ceiling. Thickly: “D'you think I succeeded?”

“I look forward,” the Nurse says, “To finding out.”

She pulls him down and kisses his forehead. He closes his eyes and counts to ten, in his head, in and out on his unsteady breaths. This isn't the end, he tells himself. It's a beginning. This and every day going forward: no fear.

“Hey,” Steve says, behind Jay's left shoulder. He opens his eyes and turns. Steve, glowing, disheveled and a little breathless; the last Jay'd seen of him he'd been trying to keep up with Eva. “Did I see Gladys leave?”

“Yeah,” Jay says. He leans against Steve. Harder than he planned; Steve lets out a gentle _oof_ and hugs him closer. Jay listens to the slow beating of Steve's heart, out of sync with his own pulse drumming in his ear: _Beat_. Pause. Pause. _Beat_. Pause. Pause. “She's going away for a little while. But she's coming back.”

“Okay,” Steve says. He sounds like he wants to ask a few more questions about that, but he holds his tongue. Just says: “You all right?”

“Tired,” Jay admits. “You think they'll forgive us if we skip out early?”

“Pretty sure they'll understand.” Steve inclines his chin. “If they even notice.”

Jay turns his head on Steve's shoulder. Across the room, Jakob is using plastic spoons to explain something very seriously to half a dozen of Ang's friends; Eva and Mina and Noor and one of Eva's colleagues have started a kick line on the stage for the benefit of Ibrahim's camera; over by the sound system, Gertie is showing four strapping young Alawadi cousins how to lift Tabby over their shoulders on a chair. Jay straightens up just as two children run past, and he has to double-take even as he's dodging them; Lily and Benj have swapped clothes, Benj wearing his plastic crown and Lily's dress, Lily in Benj's little tuxedo. They both have a staggering quantity of cake in their hair.

“Okay,” Jay says, “Yeah, let's get out of here,” and tugs Steve towards the doors by his tie.

They walk home— _home_! Jay marvels privately; _theirs!_ —in the broken quiet of late evening, hearing through open windows the occasional chink of silverware, murmuring voices; the scuffle of some small animal in the hedgerow, waking up or going to sleep. Neither of them, it seems like, can bear to burst the sweet, close bubble of it by speaking, not until the loud clinking of Steve's keys as he draws them out of his pocket does the job for them.

“Well,” Jay says, as they turn onto the lane, “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, soft and maybe a little surprised. Steadier: “Yeah. I, uh. I miss home, still. Back-when home, I mean. Sometimes. Okay—a lot of the time. But if I had to come anywhere at all, I'm glad it was here and now. I'm really damn glad I get to live in a world where I can go and see two ladies getting hitched like it's no big deal. Or be invited,” looking at Jay, “You and me. Just like that. Dancing together. Nobody looking.”

Jay grins. “We didn't get much of a dance. Everybody else wanted a turn with you. Should I be jealous?”

“Depends what you aim to do with it, I guess,” Steve says, fumbling the keys.

Jay half expects to be dog-piled, literally, when the door opens, but a peek into the sitting room reveals Miss Havisham and Tobermory valiantly and, it appears, successfully, trying to sleep on the armchair together. Tobermory's head is mostly hidden under Miss H's rear end. Jay and Steve share a moment of suppressed hilarity in the hall before tiptoeing off to wash their faces and change out of their suits, Steve shooting Jay a curious glance when he doesn't take off his prosthetic.

“Why don't you grab a few blankets and meet me down by the shed?” Jay says. “I got something to do first.”

“Are we stargazing?”

“Gonna make you _see_ stars, if I do my job right,” Jay says. Steve licks his upper lip and flees. Jay laughs to himself in the bedroom. _His_ bedroom. God. He wants to touch everything, to grow big enough to hover over all of it: the house and Steve and the Nurse, stepping onto a train somewhere out there in the crisp evening, and everyone still dancing in the town hall, laughing, safe and happy. Bucky, curled up small in his bones. That vicious tenderness welling up in him like water. He wants to grow big enough to hold all of them in his arms.

He can't do any of that, but he can go to Steve.

Jay finds him waiting cross-legged on the blanket, fidgeting nervously with the hurricane lamp. He relaxes when he looks up and sees Jay coming towards him, his knees falling open and his long feet uncurling.

“What's that look for?” Jay asks. He eases himself down and stretches out, feeling a vertebrae pop gratefully in his back. Steve tilts over onto one hip, leaning across him, planting a hand by his ribs. It looks like a coy move, but Jay knows Steve too well by now to fall for that; he's bluffing. “What'd you think I was coming out with, a horsewhip?”

“I was pretty sure you were gonna,” and Steve cuts off when Jay pulls the slick out of his pocket and waggles it at him. “Oh god. You were serious.”

“I never joke about sex,” Jay says, mock-gravely, but Steve just hisses: “What if somebody—” and Jay puts his hand over Steve's mouth and raises his eyebrows. “Steve. No one'll see. Nobody in the neighborhood's gonna be home for hours. And besides, we'd hear someone coming.”

Steve shoots him a pained look over the hand.

“I bet you can't do it,” Jay says, with friendly teeth. “I bet you can't last—” He looks up at the stars; calculates: “—ten minutes out here before you lose your nerve.” Steve's jaw sets firm and Jay, letting him go, hears celebratory trumpets in his head. “Oh? You think so? Get your pants off, then, hotshot.”

Steve wriggles his way out of his clothes with a lot more drama than Jay thinks is really necessary, under the circumstances, and as quickly as if Jay was sitting there with his thumb on a stopwatch. It's only as Steve's stripping off his second sock with his big toe, head just emerging from his shirt and his hair on end, that he pauses and says, “Not you?”

“Not me,” Jay agrees. He turns off the lamp and crooks his finger. Steve chews his lip as if he's considering his options. His skin's hot when he swings a leg over, pressing up against the hand Jay leans hard into the crease of his thigh, calves on either side of Jay's hips, hovering like he's not sure whether he wants to take a seat or bend forward for a kiss. Jay feels like he could topple mountains, Steve blood-hot breathing-hard on top of him like this in the dappled dark. Propping himself up on his elbow with his prosthetic fingers tucked into the damp back of Steve's knee—probably damp, anyway, he'll be sweating, but Jay can't tell; he'll have to ask Stark if that's possible, the next time he gets an upgrade—Jay makes up Steve's mind for him and tugs him down with a hand on the back of his neck, proprietary. Steve makes a garbled noise into his mouth.

After a minute Jay gives into the temptation to ask: “What _would_ you do? If someone came down the path right now? D'you think you'd—”

“Christ. _Die_?”

“—spontaneously combust? Oh, come on, you wouldn't die. It's not that bad.”

“I hate you,” Steve says, “I— _ah_ ,” as Jay strokes him with the backs of his fingers, barely touching, just a hello. Steve plants his hands next to Jay's ears, his spine curling up. Something like a flinch banding across his skin, when Jay reaches for the bottle that's nearly rolled off the blanket.

“Sorry;” flicking the lid open: “You were saying?” Steve glares at him. “Okay. Tell me why it scares you.”

“Feels like—” Breaking off to groan, as Jay takes him in a wet grip, intentionally too light; then all in a rush: “Like the cops're gonna come around any second and catch me on my knees with somebody's—”

“That ever happen?”

“No,” Steve says, “We always got away,” and breathing in sharp through his nose he adds, “But that's not—not really the point, and besides, these days it's not cops, it's—it's all the _cameras_ , and—”

“But you kind of like it,” Jay teases. “I mean, Christ. Look at you.”

“I like _you_ , it's not the same—goddammit.”

Jay grins heavenward, maybe a little less steady than he expected. That's an awfully nice thing for an ego to hear, he thinks, as his eyes adjust and the whole spangle of the sky opens up above them. Maybe Steve has a point. It's not embarrassment, but something finer, lighter than shame; if Jay lets it fill him up he'll float away. If there's a word he can't think of it. Almost incendiary. _Combust_ , he'd said, but it's not quite right; it's an animal thing. He feels it rising up in him and lets it expand to fill his chest, his ribs, even though it frightens him a little in its hugeness, its want. He looks up at the stars instead of inwards, at its searching claws.

“Oh, hey,” Jay says, twisting his hand absentmindedly, “Cassiopeia's out. Usually I miss it behind the hedges. I read the other day that they call that bright star near the bottom 'the breast,' but I really don't see it.”

“S-sure. Cas—'s _great_.”

“Did you know it's the strongest radio source outside the Solar System? There was a supernova there in 1600-something.”

“Why do I get the feeling,” Steve grits out, “That you're not taking this seriously?”

Jay puts on his very flattest, deadest expression and says, “Don't you kinkshame me,” and Steve finally, finally laughs, his belly jumping against Jay's knuckles. “There you go, sweetheart. C'mon. You gonna let me get down to business?”

“Thought we already were,” Steve says. “What business you got in mind?”

“You riding my hand into the sunset.”

The noise Steve makes is like he's trying to choke and laugh at the same time and not really succeeding at either. He bats the hand off his dick and hauls Jay upright, his hands in Jay's hair and his mouth hot. Jay grabs at Steve's waist and hangs on for dear life. Steve doesn't seem to notice that he's jerking his hips in sweet little pulses, rubbing off against Jay's shirt and making soft, happy noises. Jay strokes firm up and down Steve's ribs, his spine, encouraging, the lionhearted thing thundering away in his chest. The prosthetic drags; his right hand sliding smooth.

Steve pulls off just long enough to say, “You think I'm gonna let you fuck me out here, you've lost your goddamned mind,” before he dives back in.

“You scared?” Jay asks the corner of Steve's mouth.

“Hell yeah.”

“You gonna let me anyway?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, very small; shy, even, if it didn't have an edge behind it. He tries to avoid eye contact by kissing Jay again, but Jay doesn't let him, lowering himself down onto his back using Steve's hipbones as anchors. He holds up his right hand, fingers tucked together, and looks pointedly at Steve, the bottle—and back to Steve, who flushes so hard Jay can see it in the dark.

“You're a menace,” Steve mutters, even as he's obeying. “Christ. You don't even know.”

“Don't I?” Jay asks innocently. Teasing wet fingers up the inside of Steve's thigh, up, up, _in_ , listening to his breath hitch, not even sure if he's paying attention. “I don't need a functioning johnson to know what _you_ like, sweetheart. You're clear as glass.”

“That's— _hell_ ;” hunching over and digging his fingers into Jay's shoulders, “That's—not what Bucky used to say.”

“No?”

“Used to say I was—was the most difficult piece of jerk-shit — high-maintenance—”

“ _You_?”

“Health problems,” Steve manages, “Always biting off more'n I could chew and getting shirty when I couldn't.” Breathless: “Or when he wouldn't let me.”

“Thought you said you two only fooled around,” Jay says. “That sounds like awful heavy fooling.” Steve just shakes his head, helpless, his mouth dropping open as Jay moves from the wrist, purposeful, not letting up when Steve shudders and rolls his head forward. “But you wanted him to, right? You wanted him to make you.”

“I,” Steve says.

Jay curls, curls, _pressing_ in with half his hand harder than Steve usually asks for, listening to the muted sounds in Steve's throat get higher, higher, and then—

He stops.

Steve makes a teeth-clenched rageful noise and punches the ground next to Jay's head. His chest heaving. Fine trembles running down his arms. Jay feels acutely the skin on back of his neck, his cheeks prickling in sympathy. He threatens with a fourth finger and—“Jesus _god_ ,” Steve gasps—rocks deep. Steve's coltish trembling legs. His chin drops to his chest. “G—”

“You want it?” Jay says. “Go on, then. Nobody stopping you.”

“I'm gonna short-sheet your bed,” Steve growls, like he's not shaking in Jay's lap, like he's not already rocking back, greedy for it.

“ _Our_ bed,” Jay corrects him. They grin at each other; Jay triumphant, Steve like he's three-quarters of the way to setting his canines in Jay's throat.

“Funny way to christen it,” Steve says, panting, “Out here in the garden;” and his eyes slam shut when Jay plants his left elbow and rises open-mouthed towards him. Jay expects Steve to kiss like a brawl, this time, but instead he leans in sugary and careful, no tongue or teeth, like he's trying to be pliant, agreeable—small. Their lips catch, dry, so Jay licks at Steve's, and Steve makes a noise like he's been shot. His hand spasming at his hip: open, closed. Open.

“You can touch yourself, you know,” Jay offers, and Steve says, very quickly: “You could tell me not to,” and Jay can't help laughing as he says, “No, I don't think I will. If it's your idea it doesn't count, does it? If we're playing that game?” This time Steve does bite him.

“I almost don't want to,” Steve confesses after a moment, slowing. “Finish, I mean.”

“But?”

Wincing: “But I probably won't be able to sleep if I don't.”

Jay pets soothingly at his thigh, his hip, the muscles bunching at his waist, as Steve's breathing edges down from ragged to just deep. Jay can feel how tense he is from inside; he'd been close. “Serum?”

Steve nods. “If I get this...you know. It doesn't really let up.”

“Pretty sure it would if I dumped you in the pond.”

“You'd like to think you could,” Steve says darkly.

“Then I guess we're doing it the hard way,” Jay says, “Here,” and pokes Steve until he rolls off and onto his back. Jay pushes Steve's right knee up and makes him grab it, and then settles between his legs and says, “You're gonna have to walk me through this, Captain Alleyway,” and Steve manages to get out: “Through wh—” before Jay rocks three fingers back in, opens his mouth just over the head of Steve's dick, and looks up expectantly.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve hisses. “No way, you're on your own, if you think I'm gonna be able to string _two words together_ —”

“Your funeral,” Jay says, and lowers his head to the sound of Steve clapping his own hand over his mouth, muffling what Jay suspects he's going to deny was the start of a shout. Jay, more concerned about his ability to learn on the job than the possibility of startling any nearby sheep, isn't really paying enough attention to call him out on it later.

Jay doesn't know what Steve's asking for when his other hand drifts down to curl at the base of Jay's neck, grabbing at him almost apologetically, so he says “Mmnn?” without pulling off. Steve's fingers tighten in his hair. When Jay glances up, Steve's a picture, twisting awkwardly, halfway to sitting with his hair wild, his lip dragging through his teeth so hard it looks like it hurts. Even in the dark Jay can see sweat on his throat. Jay has a flash of some paparazzi neanderthal taking a photograph of him like this: his broken-open face, his bitten mouth pawed over by the public—and nearly whites out in a surge of protective rage. Jay shuts his eyes and flattens his tongue and doubles down, furious, curling in _deep_ like he wants to climb up, bone by bone, wrap his hand around Steve's heart and make a roof, a wall, a shield between him and the hungry, grasping world.

In hindsight, it shouldn't be surprising that Steve doesn't last long, after that, but it still takes Jay off guard. He's only been coughing for about three seconds when Steve sits up, Jay's fingers still hooked half inside him, getting his hands on Jay's face and gasping, “Oh god, oh god, I'm so sorry, hell, I'm—J? You okay?”

“Hubris,” Jay wheezes, and “M'fine,” redundantly, as Steve starts laughing.

“Overachiever,” he says fondly.

“I didn't hurt you?”

“Jesus, no,” Steve says, tugging at Jay's clothes ungracefully. He lets Steve manhandle him out of his shirt. Steve's still laughing as he pulls Jay down, loose-limbed and flushed and planting messy kisses on Jay's jaw, his neck, under his ear; it takes actual effort to slot their lips together because Steve wants to wander all over his face, loving on him indiscriminately like a dog. Steve after sex is ninety percent hands, shameless, all his body-shyness filed away for later. Jay always wants to keep him in that place for as long as he can, and he feels the pressure of it now, as their tacky skin starts cooling. They'll have to go inside soon enough and he doesn't want to break the spell.

Pinning Steve's hands above his head is a pretty flimsy lead-in to wrestling on the damp blankets, but Steve gleefully takes the bait, knocking Jay's hip with his knee and twisting under him. Jay teases Steve with his open mouth, backing away, not quite letting him have it. When Steve finally surges up and rolls them over, Jay lets him, wrapping his arms around Steve's neck and going limp, sighing as Steve covers him with his whole weight, heavy and warm. He grunts a protest when Steve makes like he's going to get up, but he shifts just enough to tug a loose blanket over them before he settles back down, reaching up a hand to card idly through Jay's hair like he's decided it's insufficiently messy.

“Well, Mr. Smith,” Steve says, when Jay's nearly asleep, “How does it feel to be king of all you survey?”

“Mr. Barnes,” Jay says carefully. “Don't you think?” Steve's hand stills in his hair. “It's just, it's the name my mother gave me, right? Smith's only—a cover.” He pauses. “Unless it was my dad who picked it.”

Their jawbones bump as Steve shakes his head. “Your dad wanted to call you George. As in George Washington Barnes. Your ma put her foot down.”

Jay barks laughter. “Well, I guess he'd be disappointed to have a surprise son called _J_. Maybe I should've called myself Abraham Lincoln.”

“They would've loved you,” Steve says, almost viciously. It makes Jay jump; he hadn't thought he was being so transparent. “If you'd come home like this after the war? They would've _loved_ you. Them and your sisters and—and everybody.”

“And you?” Jay hears himself ask. “Would you still've loved him, even if he couldn't remember you? Even if he was—different? Or two people? Or—”

“I did,” Steve says. “I would. I do.”

 

☆

 

Jay will forget to shut the curtains.

At dawn he'll squint blearily into a shaft of sunlight as it cuts across the pillows, sharp through Steve's hair and warm on Jay's face, confounding him. He's so accustomed to rain, here, all the light in the world filtered through mist and the morning fog rolling in off the water. He'll blink, and blink, and close his eyes. Over the course of twenty minutes he'll have three soft-edged thoughts: that the dogs are going to wake up any minute now, that he and Steve desperately need a bath or twelve, and that what he really needs to plant in that corner where nothing's taking is nasturtiums; you can't kill nasturtiums. The dogs will be the things that propel him groaning out of bed, leaving behind Steve's half-awake grasping hands. _Back in a minute_ , Jay will murmur into his ear.

In a few hours they'll have breakfast in the garden—or rather Steve will eat and watch the early robins, and Jay will nurse a cup of tea until it's drying in a ring around the rim. It'll be cold and sour if he remembers it, but watching Steve watch the birds: he won't. In the afternoon they'll walk to see the newlyweds, their house full of chaos and cousins, and they'll steal the kids so they can run wild, taking them and the dogs down to the fallow field with the river and the good climbing oak. Steve will push Jay into the river and Jay will pull Steve in after him. (Years from now, Lily will remember it as the day she learned more swear words than she'd thought even her _mum_ knew.) Later, Eva will say to Steve, when she thinks Jay is out of earshot: _Yes, I know. Sometimes I want to lock up everyone's hearts in a drawer like Mary Shelley. But you can't. You can just throw roses into the abyss, really. And thank the monsters that didn't swallow you alive_. Jay will think of the yearless times, the thing he'd once called his season of happiness; the people he's been, the people he could've become and didn't, the people he might be. The person he will be, someday, god willing. A better and better man.

But he doesn't know any of that yet, now: weaving through a kitchen not designed for fragile human legs and two large, hungry dogs, turning on the kettle and spilling kibble on the floor. Reminding himself to change the myoelectric sheeting on his stump in the next few days; rubbing his face and yawning as he kicks up the toilet seat with his foot. He'll consider showering alone, as he rinses the cotton out of his mouth, but only considers. Not when he can wait and have Steve jostling him with soap in his hair.

He'll nearly miss it. Turning away from the bathroom mirror he'll stop, startled, by an image he isn't expecting; he doesn't look like himself. His hair pillow-tousled the opposite way he usually parts it, helped along by Steve's fingers. He looks younger, paler; sleepy-eyed, before he takes a step back and squints sharply at his reflection. Dust on the glass like age spots on a photograph. After a moment he'll raise his chin and soften his gaze, just to try it. Well, he'll think: _well, what do you know_ ; and hearing the click of his throat as he swallows he'll tilt his jaw, and he'll think: yes, that's it, that's right, that's—and there in the dim room, in the morning silence, he will open his mouth and say:

 _Hello_.

  
  
  


_fin._

**Author's Note:**

> T-T-T-THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!
> 
> I can't believe it.
> 
> Most of my fic writing has been done in an echo chamber, craft-wise, but _open your houses_ was midwifed into the world by too many souls to name. I would especially like to thank the Discord denizens -- in particular: praximeter and newsbypostcard for the endless cheerleading, quietnight for being a terrible enabler, and silentwalrus for inspiring That One Scene. Dreadful grandpa kisses to the whole ruddy lot of you, and to anyone whose kind words I've neglected to acknowledge. I couldn't have done it without you.
> 
> One more (oh-so-very-much not canon) crossover fic in the Moment universe is forthcoming. (Oh boy!!)
> 
> And as always -- thank you all so much for reading! <333


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